Posted: 11th July 2018

Senior Research Fellow Philippa Hopcroft and Senior Researcher Thomas Gibson-Robinson won an award for the Coco Platform plugin for MagicDraw at this year’s No Magic World Symposium in Dallas. They received the ‘Cameo Award for Modelling, Simulation & Analysis Excellence 2018’ at the symposium, where Philippa and Thomas also gave a demo of the system, and Philippa gave a talk as an invited speaker. The Coco Platform is a revolutionary technology that integrates scalable automated verification and code generation with existing industry standard languages and tools for the purposes of developing large-scale software in practice.

There is a growing need for new technologies to develop the increasingly complex software found in many products today. This increase in complexity is driven by end-user demand for features such as increased automation and autonomy, improved diagnostics and prognostics, improved availability, improved reliability and safety, increased connectivity, better usability and increased performance. To manage this complexity, systems are becoming more distributed, modular and using more complex hardware. However, this leads to software becoming more expensive to develop and makes it more difficult to achieve the required reliability using traditional techniques.

The Coco Platform is being developed to tackle these challenges and reduce the cost of developing software in practice. This work is being supported by EPSRC, Innovate UK and the Aerospace Technology Institute (SECT-AIR project). The research group also work with industry partners across different sectors including high-tech manufacturing, aerospace, defence and automotive.

Photo far below (from left): Thomas Gibson-Robinson, Philippa Hopcroft and Guy Broadfoot (team member)